Taj Mahal, circulations of science, and (post) colonial present

ABSTRACT

This article makes a case for post-structuralist intervention in history of science and technology. The issue for me is not simply historical/archival elisions and distortions. Rather, following Derrida, I would like to highlight that the presences and absences (i.e. what is seen/shown and what is erased) are systematically related, and a deconstruction of their interplay is necessary to unravel the cultural (un)conscious that often undergirds any historical discourse. Specifically, I explore two (post) colonial implications of Eurocentric historicism that undergird diffusion theories and continue to impact history and sociology of science and technology. First, I investigate how the West not only becomes the center of calculation but also an object of calculation for local hegemony and dominance. Second, through a deconstructive reading of Meera Nanda’s critique of Hindu science, I suggest that both Hindu science and its critique are exemplifications of a (post) colonial present.

KEYWORDS:

• Euro/West-centrism
• orientalism
• post-structuralism
• Hindu science
• circulation
• postcolonial

Notes

1. Joseph and Robinson, “Policy.”

2. The role of emplotment in historiography, which forces us to look beyond the domain of archived knowledge, has been widely debated and written about. See e.g. White, Metahistory; de Certeau, The Writing of History; and Chatterjee, “Introduction.”

3. As quoted in Balasubramaniam, “New Insights,” 392.

4. One legislator of the Bhartiya Janata Party, which presently heads the national and a majority of the state governments in India, has claimed, “Taj was built by ‘tyrants’ who worked to destroy the Hindus of U.P. and the country.” http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/adityanath-to-visit-agra-says-it-doesnt-matter-who-built-taj/article19875964.ece, accessed 30 November 2017.

5. Arnold presents Nehruvian science “as a way of framing the problem of postcolonial science.”

6. Nehru specifically draws on technological examples, ships, printing, and clocks, to present what he characterized as “the contrast between Asia and Europe in mechanical advance and creative energy.”; and Nehru, The Discovery of India, 281.

7. Safier, “Global Knowledge,” 133. Fan, “Science in Cultural Borderlands”; Gómez, “The Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century”; and Raj, Relocating.

8. Fan, “Modernity, Region, and Technoscience”; and Anderson, “Asia as Method.”

9. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 18.

10. Ibid., 279.

11. For an elaboration of the concept of center of calculation see Latour, Science in Action; and Latour, Pandora’s Hope.

12. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.

13. Derrida, Dissemination; and Derrida, Of Grammatology.

14. Derrida, Writing and Difference.

15. The concept of “history of the present” is attributed to Michel Foucault. Foucault’s unraveling of genealogies of the prison, the clinic, etc. aimed at showing how history embodied in such institutions and practices “are still ours today and within which we are trapped.” Simon, “A Conversation.” The concern for Foucault was not only historiographic, but also ontological – to uncover “an ontology of ourselves, of present reality.” Foucault, The Government, 21; and see also Hacking, Historical Ontology.

16. Prasad, Imperial Technoscience.

17. Ibid., 84.

18. Subrahmanyam shows that apart from other factors that are commonly emphasized for the emergence of Europe/West, “the ‘medieval’ view of the world” was a crucial element in the process. Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories”. Interestingly, Nehru discusses such trans-societal exchanges at the time of Akbar. However, he argues that in relation to mechanical arts such exchanges were superficial. Nehru, for example, writes: “No attempt was made to understand how these spring clocks were made or to get them made in India.” He goes on to argue: “This lack of mechanical bent is remarkable, especially as there were very fine craftsmen and artisans in India” Nehru, The Discovery of India, 281.

19. Raj, Relocating, 180.

20. Prasad, Imperial Technoscience; and Prasad, “Make in India.”

21. Raj, Relocating, 166.

22. Fan, “The Global Turn,” 52.

23. Gómez, “The Circulation of Bodily Knowledge,” 386; and Safier, “Global Knowledge”.

24. It is important to historically situate Eurocentric dualisms and the very idea of “Western science”. See Seth, “Colonial History”; and Elshakry, “When Science Became Western”.

25. Interview with G. Suryan, 21 May 2002. The quotations and information that follow are from this interview.

26. See Itty Abraham for how contestations and circulations between centers of science within India take place. Abraham’s work shows that, along with explorations of circulations of sciences between West/non-West, we need to map other landscapes of sciences as well. Abraham, “Landscape and Postcolonial Science”.

27. Govil, G. “An Account of the Development of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) in India.” Indian Journal of History of Science 50, no. 3 (2015): 456–475.

28. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/indian-science-congress-organisers-refuse-to-share-paper-on-ancient-indian-aviation/article6760701.ece, accessed 2 December 2017.

29. https://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/t_dy/t_dy_Q14_frameset.htm, accessed 2 December 2017.

30. Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” 63.

31. Ibid. In the article, Nandy focuses on contestations of Hindu right over the history of the Ram Janam Bhoomi temple/Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Claims of Hindu science present similar contestations over history. Gyan Prakash, rightly acknowledging the importance of Nandy’s critique, argues, Nandy’s “criticism [of modernity undergirded by science] is not wrong, but it remains captive to the object of its criticism.” Prakash, “Science between the Lines,” 60.

32. According to Banu Subramaniam, “religious nationalists are not merely reverting to ‘tradition’ or decolonizing India or Indian history but to appropriating modernity and Western science into a Hindu agenda.” Subramaniam, “Arachaic Modernities”.

33. P. C. Ray, who published “a history of Hindu Chemistry” in 1902, traced the origin of his own engagement with Hindu science to the work of William Jones and other Indologists. Ray, A History of Hindu Chemistry. Romila Thapar, among others, has argued that Orientalists engagement with ancient Hindu texts “strengthened the indigenous tradition of acclaiming the Sanskritic traits of Indian culture.” Thapar, “Interpretations of Ancient Indian History,” 319. For an analysis of how science in colonial India was deployed for reclamation of the past and renegotiation of colonial power through translation and transformation see Prakash, “Science between the Lines”; and Prakash, Another Reason.

34. Thapar, “Interpretations of Ancient Indian History,” 319.

35. For example, an online document published through the sponsorship of the United States-based Infinity Foundation, states: “Did you know that smallpox inoculation started in India before the West?” and then, drawing on various texts, culled out of historical and sociological analyses, the authors present their claim. https://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/t_dy/t_dy_Q14_frameset.htm, accessed 3 December 2017.

36. Nanda, “Saffronized Science”; and Nanda, Science in Saffron.

37. Nanda, “Saffronized Science,” 40.

38. Ibid., 42.

39. Nanda, “Hindutva’s Science Envy,” 2016.

40. Nanda, “Saffronized Science, 42.

41. Derrida, Dissemination, 297; and Steven Shapin argues, “[t]here was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution.”; and Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 1.

42. See Nanda, “The Science Wars in India”.

43. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 292.